Monday, August 30, 2010

"if I didn't have to kill myself doing it, maybe I wouldn't think so much of you"

[Fuck you. Yeah, you. You are the voice that stops me from saying what I want to say, making me delete and repeat, so fuck you. I don't know how you became such a nemesis of mine, but I will tell you this, I don't miss you and I never really did, do you understand? I know you don't understand why (because you are the opposite of me, because you hate everything for no good reason and I just couldn't do that too). I know it burns you up and pisses you off that I not only lived my life, but I didn't miss you in the process, well, I'm sorry about that.]

As I learn to undo the bindings I imposed on myself, one of them, a big one, a difficult one is saying no to offers of friendship that just don't suit me. I said yes for so many reasons, I didn't want to say no, I didn't know how to say no, I thought, meh, why not? I didn't have a lot of friends. I didn't know what friendship was. As you get older, your tastes get more nuanced, and your hopes for complete understanding begin to fade. At least mine did.

So along the last seven or eight years, as I was learning what I liked and didn't like, what I cared for and what I didn't, I realized I had acquired friends that didn't really suit me, but I still tried to keep them on, like an ill fitting item of clothing, out of some deference to their liking me, out of some strange obligatory feeling, despite the fact that my initial reaction was one of repulsion. I suppose it is so rare that I immediately like someone and get along with them that I tend to discredit my intuition. Every so often, it does turn out that I was wrong about a person. Usually it gets muddled as it grows more intimate, so it is harder for me to really say how I feel about someone.

Lately, time is reconciling the balance of these tiresome relationships in my life; it seems every year after that initial massacre of my friendships (three close friends hacked out of my life in one summer), then came the serial killings (a calculating measure of everyone and gone were two of my good friends), and lastly, there was the perfunctory expulsion of some people who I never really understood why we had friendships in the first place (sometimes being a raft means I get boarded by desperate drowners). The pace was abruptly halted from its steadily declining maliciousness (I may have turned into an absentee friend or faded from consciousness like normal people end friendships) because of that shock, in which I have spent the last two years endeavoring not to hurt anyone the way he had hurt me.

Except in not saying no to people who have run the gamut of wasting my time, stressing me out over unnecessary things, making me feel shitty for not being whatever it is they thought I was (despite my protests and attempts to be exactly who I am), I am finding myself in the misery of not having trusted my instincts.

Some of them are huge drains (they decried my assessments of her and time has told me that I was not wrong, yet daily I am forced to be offended by her in one way or another), others are slight annoyances (she still likes me, oh praise the lord, I didn't know how I was going to get to sleep without her affections validating me; me, the woman who is ten years her senior and twice as experienced in life), while still others are tangled in intimacy and the threat of love (he claims, but never settles over me; he is here, but is vacant; he is a joy and a delight, but he scares me sometimes with his needs).

Strangely, fending them off, especially backed with a rap sheet as long as my legs (so many emotional crimes I've committed against them), they have resisted so mightily that twice I've been forced to question myself, something I haven't done in a while because I was fairly settled back then. I long for those days when I kept resolute and firm, despite the anger it provoked. With them, I cannot be so sure, because I don't know if I can trust myself about them.

Those rest who have stood with me now for years and years, they are mine and I am theirs. I see in them gladness at my arrival, pleasure in our company, a smile rests on our lips and the conversations between us are both languishing and accelerated, a magical feat I realize has more to do with who they are rather than how I view them. My eyes may be shrewd and observant. My tongue may be critical and lacking tact. They are people who can withstand me because they have no guilt, no shame, no worries. Rather than inspire queries, they inspire awe. I find that the more time I spend with them, the less I need those who confound me.

Friday, August 27, 2010

present

Summer

Saturday, August 21, 2010

the curly mane is coming back

It's been so long since I had them that people don't even remember them. I thought they were memorable, they seemed to be so big and took up so much space. I mean, sometimes, it felt like my curls wore me.

When I cut them, they weren't too long, but I didn't want them anymore. The curls required a lot of work and get this: they still didn't look good. I had to use a smelly stupid icky hair product and my closet is full of the rejected gels and potions that never tamed my hair the way I'd hoped. I then forced myself follow an elaborate overnight scheme (suffice it to say there was a lot of thought put into those curls and the hair in general) that still resulted in what I derisively called "clown hair," "the mop," and "cousin it."

I charmed the babies with the hair. They loved playing peek a boo in that mane, in my arms, their faces buried so close to mine, but lost in my hair. Otherwise, it was a tool of defense; it cloaked me from prying eyes.

When I sat there, in front of her, she teasingly suggesting that she could do a makeover hairstyle for me, that she could give me a haircut that was drastically different, I had no hesitation in saying, yes, chop it off. No one understands except those who have reached a point of no return with their hair (she cut hers off in desperation, those long blonde locks and her shorn head a stunning sight, to learn her anew, a face, details, her body no longer the ultimate silhouette of womanhood and beauty; another had hers taken by accident and it also brought her into focus, a dazzling wit, a sparkling conversationalist, a brain of such staggering depth, intelligence and a moral compass so pure, I trust her judgment above all; and me, nothing could be worse than being shorn so short as a boy in fourth grade when I was already such a struggling wobbling mess of a person.). I was tired of it, it was too much to deal with. So I promised I wouldn't cry to assure her suddenly doubting mask and she tore into my hair, and in the end I had something even more startling, a hairstyle that did not match me even more than that big poufy hair. It wasn't a bad haircut, you see, it was just not the right haircut for my wardrobe, my job or my life.

She took all the curls, cut my hair into a bob and straightened what was left. My hair touched the edges of my cheeks and for the first time in a long time, my neck was open to the world, she cut the curls all the way to the roots and left jagged sharp bristles behind.

I don't think I went through the same sharpening upon having new hair. I had had haircuts before that didn't suit me, but this one was so well styled that no matter how easy it would have been for me to muss it up, I couldn't. It actually was easier than the curls, I learned slowly and with a yawning surprise. I didn't need any products. I ironed my hair with a flat iron to make it straight. My somewhat chiding inner environmentalist lectured, Sure the energy from the flat iron was a part of my footprint, but as least the physical by-product of using electricity compared to the "recycled" bottles was lower. It may not have suited me across the board, but it definitely looked good on me.

For the first year of the two years of pretending to have straight hair, I allowed my hair to be cut short and the curls at the nape of my neck removed. The second year I grew bored of the hair, spurned by photos of me wearing what looked like a wig but was in fact my own hair and began the tedious process of letting my hair grow out.

After a year of growing and one setback haircut in that time (she didn't listen to just a trim and took about five inches off. I had to start all over) the curls are slowly crawling out of my scalp, they wrestle each other at night and when I look in the mirror in the morning I don't see what I used to see (the bad things), I see the hair that is mine that I am scared to wear outside.

A wild tumble of big loose curls that do not allow for timidity, hiding or shielding me from the world. To wear those curls, my real hair, I would have to learn how to look past the stares again. So I began to tell them, as a warning about the curls. They scoffed and swore no memory of the mass that only two years prior had begun to feel like it was alive and growing and gaining on me and I needed to exorcise it. I told them that I was ready to have curly hair again, outside in public (I have been practicing at home with the curls, feeling them, pulling them into ponytails and shaping them into giant curls tumbled into pastries at the nape of my neck; my curls have a tendency to hold any shape under little coercion it is thick, rope like, there is a lot of it, it feels like a blanket across my arm.).

Somehow, it seems strange to say that accepting my curls, letting go of what anyone else thinks or wondering what they think behind those blank dead staring eyes, rather than getting my hair cut to remove the veil, I need to accept my hair, curly gray and wild to return to my natural womanhood, to allow the beauty I have been hiding these past two years (from that shock and so many other things); she will emerge, and then I will be truly sharpened into who I am and have always been.

Monday, August 2, 2010

"cold hard knot of hate"

It sits at my throat, where the words come out. It is a talisman, a reminder, a symbol (that I would burn into my skin if I could, if I had the guts for it), my scarlet letter.

How it can be all of those things, and beautiful, and belong to me is incredible.

It almost makes me feel bad, the cost of it, both ways. It came with a huge struggle, a decision that every so often I still wonder about, but don't regret. That's not what this is about. What's done is done.

Instead, let's say the years had gone by and the memories were fading and I had reached a dead part of my life, in which I had burned off all that I could and stood back looking at the charred remains of my life (it was the second time; the first being connected to the thing that woke me up, that made me alive and the diamond I wear at the base of my neck).

The paper was gone, all gone. The trinkets, the things, they disappeared to taste and time. The day to day stuff was gone in a poof, almost like when you push a pin into a very full balloon it doesn't deflate slowly, it pops with a surprise from the pressure. The last thing left was a white box with a cheesy satin-esque fabric (despite its highbrow upbringings, it had some issues with classiness). It lasted three or four moves, it sat in the same spot after each move, temporarily in a box, then it resumed its spot in the lower left hand of my topmost dresser drawer. Every time I opened the drawer, I saw it, and pulled it close to me and then pushed it away.

I had an idea, to take the diamond out.

At first, it was suggested that I get another to match it and make earrings. Even though part of me flushed a little at the idea of my wearing diamonds atop posts in my ears (to be poor, really really poor, there are certain things you imagine you'll never see and that is one of mine), so I demurred, besides, I didn't want to buy another diamond. I wanted to make the one I had something else, was all.

After some pondering, it was newly suggested that it could be flanked by a red gold circle and the thinnest and most delicate of red gold chains and meet at the nape of my neck in a clasp. Initially it seemed ironic that I could adore something that was so not me, and be such an obvious symbol of being chained, which is exactly what I could not stomach of it in the first place. It was almost so repulsive that I hated it for a time. I instantly hated it. Any chain on my neck shouldn't be delicate, I insisted, and it made the diamond look too big.

The diamond, it amuses me. When I met it for the first time, inside the ring, it seemed so small. It was, in comparison to what usually lands on the left hand ring finger. And yet, the more I got used to it, I realized it was perfect. It suited me just fine. I didn't want to be like anyone else with a giant rock, I could go for a tiny rock and be satisfied. Even now that it has belonged to me (before it was just a thing I wore) it seems to be what I would have chosen all along, despite the charred ruins of my life.

Because it wasn't accepting the size that turned me into won me over, even though that seems likely, it was another thing that emerged in changing it to something else, a surprising thing; because I was informed, I was chided, that the diamond had been chipped somehow, during the years it rested on my finger, amid the trials and tribulations of the cafe, but it could've happened anywhere knowing me (it would be gorgeous if it happened on a keyboard while I was typing frantically away, to him especially, but any of that, really). And then it belonged to me and I belonged to it.

Well before then, they had gifted me the red gold earrings I wear everyday. A similar reaction occurred, and one might step back and look into a mirror of mirrors and see that inside each decision I make from hate, I have always honored more purely than that made from love. I learned I secretly love all that I abhor. The day that I am able to love without limits, to love without justification, to love without reasons, I will have found transcendence.

With the earrings, the necklace is whole. It makes sense with them. Strange, when I received them, that was the last time I saw him, I think, or what I remember. More importantly, it was a point in my life when the old and new met and clashed, and I saw the truth of things, and I grew up with a strange realization, despite who I had been and where I came from, I could wear pretty things, I could be beautiful, and I could be happy.